On the occasion of the death of my father, December 3, 2017, and the death of a Black girl living near you
It was 79 degrees when I was born,
sunny, there was wind, monarch
butterflies frantically migrated the
five thousand miles from Canada
to Mexico, I loved being a Black girl,
back then, at the beginning, Daddy
lifted me up after school, his baby-
blue Electra 225 pointing to our place,
lost land of black swans with wide
Negro red lips, balding cypress
tupelo gums in drag, pushing
showy out of shiny black water,
before the coming of shapely legs
and bright-eyed breasts, before
knowing I was hunted, he would
open the back door of the Buick,
Climb in, I would lie back, all the
way flat, position Y, just beneath
the long back window curling in,
cupola and nib, new hips secure,
thin black line of my long Black
girl body poured into a warm
crystal pan, in place, my arms
ready at my side, my longest toes
reach-tipping into the overhead,
spread Black girl eagle in the long
back capsule of the super silver
Deuce and a Quarter, with fender
skirts, he would shift it down,
a slow creep, a whitewall skulk,
through the former land of ivory-
billed woodpeckers, as close to
the shiny black swamp as we could
crawl, our one-car parade snail-
inching, the red ticking mud alive,
my eyes fashioned into jeweled
periscopes, floating high above
lilac Japanese irises, towering
canopies of biscuit magnolia,
silently watching for the arrival,
the most golden mortise of after
afternoon sunlight,